She enters her bedroom, closes the door, moves her desk chair under the attic square in the ceiling.

She’s only been up there once before. When they first moved into the house, she pushed the square aside to get a look at how much space she had. Propelled then by images of a secret, magic world, adjacent to her very real bedroom, she pulled herself up halfway. Only, there was nothing magical about the attic. For starters, it was only three feet high, tops. And the dust could’ve been spider webs. And the one window was as dark as a blindfold.

She slides the square aside now, listens for movement in the hall. She waits. Can the man hear her? Surely he’s been trained to recognize the telltale signs of a suspect who is considering fleeing a scene. Can he tell when the same thoughts run through the mind of a person he’s protecting?

No sound from out in the hall.

It strikes her that Coach Wanda’s insistence on pull-ups after every practice is about to pay off. There is no ladder, no easy way up.

Dana grips the ledge and pulls herself high enough so that she can get one arm flat to the damp boards. The smell is dizzying.

She thinks of Coach Wanda counting their pull-ups, the fierce woman’s voice echoing in the Samhattan High School gym.

One…

With leverage from the one arm, she swings her other over and onto the boards and pulls herself up to her waist. The man in the hall had to have heard that. Still, no sound out there. And too late to turn back. She gets over the lip. Her legs now, her feet.

She’s in.

And she’s up.

“Kit,” she says as she closes the square again, “I’m coming.”

Voices outside. Beyond the nearly opaque pane of glass.

Are they discussing Kit? Is there news? Is she dead?

Dana crawls to the window.

It’s dark and the wood is splintered, and she knows she’s going to have to pull some from her palms. Something moves beneath her right hand. She lifts it just in time to see a spider the size of her palm scurrying out of the scant light.

Her hand covers her mouth instinctively, but she can’t quite quell the groan. She’s never seen a spider this big, and if she’d known it was living above her bedroom, above her bed, she wouldn’t have stayed in this house long.

She crawls, because she has to, but doesn’t take her eyes off where the spider went. Are there more? Of course there are more.

This is their room.

At the window, she sees it has one latch, an old, rusted lever she prays will turn easily.

It does.

She eyes the rooftop and the grass beyond. No cops on the roof, thank God, but yes, a cruiser in view of the lawn she’d need to drop to.

She pushes the window open, crawls halfway out, feels a tickle on her ankle.